Friday, January 11, 2013

An Interesting Comment

The only legitimate reason to care about the Oscars is the effect they can have on the careers of the people involved... For that reason, I’m very happy to see Jennifer Lawrence’s Best Actress nomination for Silver Linings Playbook. There’s not a chance in hell she’ll win; young actress[es] don’t win Oscars for being that funny and sexy and insanely alive, unless (like Marisa Tomei and Mira Sorvino) they can be squeezed into the Best Supporting Actress category, and even then they can expect to spend the rest of their lives being expected to apologize for it. [My italics]

The suggestion that there's a kind of vengefulness against youth and beauty associated with Academy Awards to young actresses is as intriguing as it is chilling. I'm not sure that the suggestion is correct, indeed I suspect that much of the evidence for anything like Dyess-Nugent's thesis is also evidence of the Academy's larger aversion to comedy, hence can't differentially establish what Dyess-Nugent needs. But the point deserves further study.